The Telcoin Association, the independent Swiss Verein that governs Telcoin Network and TEL, has named David Palmer as its Strategic Telecom Advisor as the network approaches mainnet later this year. Palmer will advise the Association on strategy, positioning, and value proposition development across mobile operators, mobile money providers, and the GSMA. His work focuses on operator participation in the network, the application ecosystem built on it, and the network’s position within the GSMA. Palmer has been working with the Association in this role for several months.
Palmer brings more than 25 years of telecom experience, including a decade leading blockchain and Web3 work for a global mobile operator. He co-founded Pairpoint, a Vodafone and Sumitomo venture, and led blockchain exploration for Vodafone IoT, where he took the first IoT Web3 proof of concept and turned it into an MVP platform. He holds multiple patents in telecom and blockchain, sits on the board of the Asia Web3 Alliance, and is the author of “The Business of the Metaverse: How Organisations Can Optimize the Opportunities of Web3 and AI.”
“The industry that standardized GSM, SMS, and roaming is built to coordinate a global standard for money,” said Parker Spann, Founder of the Telcoin Association. “Telcoin Network gives operators that standard to own and govern together. David has spent 25 years in telecom and the last decade bringing blockchain into it. He has been part of this work for months, and today we make it official.”
Palmer added: “Mobile operators already run the world’s most trusted networks for communication. Telcoin Network lets them extend that trust to money, on a standard they own rather than rent. There are over 8 billion mobile phones and more than 20 billion machines connected by mobile operators around the world. A trust layer run by those operators has the potential to unlock the AI and machine economies and bring a new era of value for the industry.”
Telcoin Network is a public blockchain validated exclusively by GSMA mobile network operators. Validator onboarding with mobile operators is already underway ahead of mainnet. Palmer and Spann will discuss the appointment and take community questions in an X Space on Thursday, October 15, at 6:00 PM UK / 7:00 PM CET / 12:00 PM CT.
